Open Access Publishing

You may also choose to publish your article in an open access journal. Many open access journals are peer-reviewed and have excellent impact factors. They feature scholarly literature in electronic format, free of charge to the user and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. That means that users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, as long as they "give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited," according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Your consent, as the author and copyright holder, is needed to publish your work in the public domain, but you retain the right to block the distribution of mangled or misattributed copies. This is how you can maintain control over your own work.

Repositories

Another option is to archive your research in a disciplinary or institutional repository. Such repositories are indexed by search engines, such as Google and made freely accessible to potential readers. Authors may choose to put an un-refereed pre-print into the archive, before they submit it to a journal. Additionally, once and article is accepted, peer-reviewed, and the author retains the right to self-archive, then the post-print or the publisher's PDF may be used in an repository.